ESG Investing
Is Capital Structure Irrelevant with ESG Investors?
September 23, 2022
We examine whether capital structure is irrelevant for enterprise value and investment when investors care about ESG issues, which we denote “ESG-Modigliani-Miller” (ESG-MM). Theoretically, we show that ESG-MM holds if ESG is additive and markets are perfect. Empirically, we provide evidence of failure of ESG-MM, implying that firms and governments can exploit non-additive ESG or segmented markets.
Machine Learning
Machine Learning and the Implementable Efficient Frontier
August 18, 2022
We propose that investment strategies should be evaluated based on their net-of-trading-cost return for each level of risk, which we term the "implementable efficient frontier." While numerous studies use machine learning return forecasts to generate portfolios, their agnosticism toward trading costs leads to excessive reliance on fleeting small-scale characteristics, resulting in poor net returns. We develop a framework that produces a superior frontier by integrating trading-cost-aware portfolio optimization with machine learning
Tax Aware
When Fortune Doesn’t Favor the Bold: Perils of Volatility for Wealth Growth and Preservation
May 12, 2022
Entrepreneurs and executives holding much of their wealth in a highly appreciated single stock face either the high risk of idiosyncratic volatility and potentially catastrophic losses, or selling stock and facing an immediate, punitive tax burden. This paper evaluates this choice and explains how it relates to classic betting strategies and economic theory, finding tax-efficient techniques might strike the balance between the urgency to diversify concentrated risk and aversion to taxes.
Factor/Style Investing
Pricing Without Mispricing
July 16, 2021
We offer a novel test of whether an asset pricing model describes expected returns in the absence of mispricing. Our test assumes such a model assigns zero alpha to investment strategies using decade-old information. Prominent multifactor models do not satisfy this condition – while multifactor betas help capture current expected returns on mispriced stocks, persistence in those betas distorts the stocks' implied expected returns after prices correct.
Factor/Style Investing
What Can Betting Markets Tell Us About Investor Preferences and Beliefs? Implications for Low Risk Anomalies
June 30, 2021
We relate the low risk anomaly in financial markets to the Favorite-Longshot Bias in betting markets and provide novel evidence to both anomalies. Synthesizing the evidence, we study the joint implications from the two settings for a unifying explanation. Rational theories of risk-averse investors with homogeneous beliefs cannot explain the cross-sectional relationship between diversifiable risk and return in betting markets. Rather, we appeal to models of non-traditional preferences or heterogeneous beliefs.
Factor/Style Investing
What Can Betting Markets Tell Us About Investor Preferences and Beliefs? Implications for Low Risk Anomalies
May 13, 2021
We relate the low risk anomaly in financial markets to the Favorite-Longshot Bias in betting markets and provide novel evidence to both anomalies. Synthesizing the evidence, we study the joint implications from the two settings for a unifying explanation. Rational theories of risk-averse investors with homogeneous beliefs cannot explain the cross-sectional relationship between diversifiable risk and return in betting markets. Rather, we appeal to models of non-traditional preferences or heterogeneous beliefs.
Factor/Style Investing
Is There a Replication Crisis in Finance?
March 5, 2021
Several papers argue that financial economics faces a replication crisis because many studies cannot be replicated or are the result of multiple testing of too many factors. We develop and estimate a Bayesian model of factor replication that leads to different conclusions, including finding the majority of asset pricing factors can be replicated.
Trading
Game On: Social Networks and Markets
March 1, 2021
This paper studies how echo-chamber effects and fake news can lead to disagreement and misinformation with effects on investors’ portfolios and market prices. It presents a model how an investment idea can propagate through a social network, generating a trading frenzy with high turnover, a bubble in the price, and high price volatility. The paper also presents empirical evidence on the dramatic events related to the GameStop stock in January 2021 and discusses broader economic implications.
ESG Investing
Does ESG Help or Hurt Returns?
December 7, 2020
Combining several large data sets, we compute the empirical ESG-efficient frontier and show the costs and benefits of responsible investing.
Fixed Income
Modeling Corporate Bond Returns
December 2, 2020
We propose a new conditional factor model for corporate bond returns with four factors and time-varying factor loadings instrumented by observable bond characteristics. We find our factor model excels in describing the risks and returns of corporate bonds, improving over previously proposed models in the literature by a large margin.